Red Legged Earthmites
by
Mullaloo Heights Primary School
Hollie, Lee, Sam, Graham, and Katie from Mullaloo Heights Primary School, Perth, Western Australia, recently visited a farm in the West Australian wheatbelt. While planting trees there they came across an unusual bug.What was it? What does it do? Read their report and see.
While we were on a tree planting trip on a farm just east of Northam in WA we came across an unusual bug. It had a small black body and very bright orange to red legs It looked partly like an ant and partly like a spider. It was about 2mm in length and was floating in a puddle of water near where we were planting. Mr Lawrence, the farmer, told us that we had found a red legged earth mite or RLEM for short.
Red legged earth mites are a big problem for farmers who are growing legume crops. They attack legume seedlings and seriously damage them by sucking the juice and nutrients out of them. They may also attack lupins, field peas, canola and cereal crops. The first sign of RLEM damage is when there is silvering of the leaf surface. The only way to control them is through chemical spraying or through heavy pasture grazing which keeps weeds to a minimum.
The reason that we had found the mite which is normally in the soil is that they had been washed down to the creek from the recent heavy rain. Eggs survive the summer in the ground and then they emerge when the rains come and the crop is emerging. They can breed in numbers so large that you can get up to 100,000 per square metre. They survive best in weedy crops and ground which is not tilled.
By Hollie, Lee, Sam, Graham, and Katie from Mullaloo Heights PS Perth WA
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